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About 27 years ago, when China Miéville was 12 years old, he started hearing voices. Not of the clinically concerning kind, but emanating from the mouths of aliens.

A self-described “geeky” kid who loved Doctor Who, drew his own phantasmagorical creatures and immersed himself in Dungeons and Dragons, Miéville imagined a kind of extraterrestrial that spoke in two voices simultaneously, and who could not be communicated with by humans unless they spoke back in kind: with two people talking at once.

Because he was that kind of kid, he wrote the idea down in a notebook, which he still has. And then, with passing years, with growing up into the role of one of Britain’s leading practitioners of the so-called “New Weird” literature, with a string of prizes, degrees and even runs at political office piling up on his resumé, he finally felt ready to answer those voices and heed their call.

The result is Embassytown, the 38-year-old writer’s first foray into what has been called “pure” or even “hardcore” science fiction.

“I’m very kind of faithful to my own obsessions,” says Miéville, who sports multiple ear-piercings, an elaborate serpentine tattoo and head shaved to a kind of biodome shimmer. “So I kind of had this idea, I’ve got the 27-year-old notebook in which I wrote it and I kind of just shelved it. And periodically I’d come back and try a little bit more, a little bit more and so on. Then I suppose, about six years ago, I started really kind of pulling it apart and trying again. What happens is that some peg, which in this case was just the idea of dual-voiced aliens, kind of sticks until you’re ready to really give it a go.”

The resulting novel, the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke award-winning novelist’s ninth — although he is also the PhD-bearing author of academic treatises on matters ranging from architecture to Marxism — is decidedly a thing of complicated wonder. Set on a planet colonized by humans somewhere in the far-flung future, the book tells the story of Avice Benner Cho, a galaxy-travelling “immerser” who has not only become a “simile” of the alien language but a horrified witness to what happens when the Ariekei decide they want to learn something only humans can teach them: how to lie.

Clearly, we’ve come a long way from Doctor Who. Or have we? If there’s one thing that Miéville believes in more strongly than the deep and compulsive allure of the fantastic, it’s that everything connects: all genres, all works of art, all forms of communication and all efforts by the human race to express itself to itself through narrative.

Ergo, while Embassytown might seem an intimidatingly baroque reading experience to those not steeped in the literary traditions from which it springs, at its core is a story — dreamlike, murky but compulsively involving — about storytelling. Why we need it, how it defines who we are and how it can be a powerfully manipulative force in the destiny of human affairs.

But to plunge to that level of the book’s emotional undercurrent, one has to dive through prose like this: “The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as ‘bass’ or ‘treble.’ Two sounds — they can’t speak either voice singly — inextricable by the chance coevolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialized organ of alarm.”

Who does this articulate, approachable, intellectual and yet difficult writer write for?

“It’s a really boring answer,” he says sheepishly, “but I am writing for me. Not in the sense of like saying ‘I don’t mind if other people read it, I wrote it for myself.’ I’m writing for what I hope is hundreds of thousands of mes.

“I definitely write to be read,” he adds, “but I write the kind of things that I enjoy and enjoyed reading. So you’re absolutely right and I acknowledge right off the bat that there is a kind of initial steep curve. But as a reader I don’t mind that. . . . If it’s done with facility and aplomb and all that, I enjoy having to look things up, I enjoy having a sense of culture shock and not knowing where I am. .

“And so I’m writing it because I want that sense of gradually coming to terms with this kind of strange universe. That is what keeps me interested in the literature of the fantastic in general. I have a very strong sense of tradition, I’m very aware of the tradition I come out of, and there’s certain very explicit and implicit homages in this book. So in an ideal world, what I would really like to write is stuff that is squarely within that tradition, that makes no bones about it, but that an open-minded non-genre reader might also enjoy, maybe even to their own surprise.

“So I guess I’m kind of vaguely saying I’m trying to write for what I hope is a lot of mes.”

As a lifelong geek, fantasy obsessive, and compulsive consumer and creator of intricately imagined alternate worlds, Miéville is reasonably confident in his presumption that there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of “mes” out there.

But that subspecies of the world can have a rather ambivalent relationship with this high-profile representative of its passions and interests, particularly when he starts questioning certain manifestations of intemperate geeky enthusiasm. This is what happened a few years ago, when Miéville suggested that the epidemic fanboy fascination with the originally marginal character of the bounty hunter Boba Fett, from George Lucas’s Star Wars universe, was maybe a little over the top. And stupid even.

“The reason I’m quite kind of mean about that stuff,” he explains, “and some of those tendencies, is because I share them. . . . I totally get it.

“I was very into Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a long time. It was like the last show that I got really addicted to. And I realized about two-thirds of the way into the run — I mean there’s a lot of great things about Buffy, I'm not here to diss Buffy — but I realized that a huge part of my kind of compulsive desire to watch it was not that I was following the story, but that I wanted to live in Sunnydale. I was trying to move there. And I thought that’s really f--ked up. . . .

“And if you’ve read that Boba Fett thing, I said this: part of the problem for me is that we fans can ruin the things we love that way. We should stop.

“So as a geek who loves this stuff, I want us to both raise our critical threshold and to stop going to things that we know are going to be s--t just because they’ve got aliens in them.”

Facts about China Miéville

Born: Sept. 6, 1972, in Norwich, England

Resides: London, England

Novels and novellas: King Rat (1998); Perdido Street Station (2000); The Scar (2002); The Tain (2002); Iron Council (2004); Un Lun Dun (2007); The City & the City (2009); Kraken (2010); Embassytown (2011)

Awards (both wins and nominations): The Arthur C. Clarke Award; the Hugo; the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel; the World Fantasy Award; the British Fantasy Award

Degrees: BA in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge; MA and PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics; Frank Knox fellowship from Harvard University.

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